NLR Blog

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Iowa Health System Peers with NLR for National Tele-Health, Tele-Medicine Applications

Iowa Health System is peering with National LambdaRail (NLR), leveraging NLR’s high-speed national backbone to connect its statewide fiber-optic network to world-class medical facilities and research organizations across the country. As a result, Iowa Health System will be rolling out a series of leading-edge tele-health and tele-medicine applications.

Once its statewide network is fully implemented, Iowa Health System will be one of the first programs to receive funding from the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program. It is already serving as an example for other states and regions of how high-performance, national connectivity can better serve the health needs of rural populations.

Iowa Health System is connected to NLR with 10-Gigabit Ethernet through the MREN gigapop at the Starlight communications exchange facility on Northwestern University’s Chicago campus.

Through this connection Iowa Health System will be able to exchange health-related advanced research and education information with regional, national and international communities. This information will allow participating healthcare providers in Iowa to ensure that they can provide the best possible services to their communities, including those that require data intensive networking such as high-definition images, complex multi-modal images, and collaborative discussions with remote specialists.

Iowa-based healthcare organizations will now be able to undertake cooperative research projects with health care professionals and researchers around the country and around the world, engaged in advanced specialized educational activities, and connect to even the largest and most sophisticated medical databases, such as the Genome database.

Founded in 1995, Iowa Health System is the seventh largest non-denominational healthcare provider in the country with annual revenues of $2 billion and serves nearly one of every three patients in Iowa. Iowa Health System includes 11 hospitals in seven large Iowa communities and in Rock Island and Moline, Ill., a system of hospitals in 14 rural communities and group practices of physicians and clinics in 71communities in Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska. For more information on Iowa Health System, please visit www.ihs.org.